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Comment by pimmen | Hacker News Reader

I see lots of movies in languages I don’t understand thanks to subtitles. That way, I can read the dialogue and know what they’re saying. About one or two seconds later I see the actors do their performance and get the emotional and cultural context with the dialogue.

I didn’t understand English that well when I was a kid but since we don’t translate English language media, except for subtitles, I got to hear English over and over again and now my ability to comprehend spoken English is very good. As is most Swedes, we spend just as many hours a week in English class as they do in France, Spain or Germany yet we are better at it (in general). We’re not geniuses, we just get more practice and less hand holding.

Can’t do anything about books though, sadly. If I read a book in a language I don’t understand I probably have the intention to learn that language.

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Imagine being the director of the movie and seeing this, remembering all the hours you put into directing the actors to give your vision life, and now people is reading lines of text in a different language overlaid on the screen instead of paying attention to what’s happening :-)

That's a misconception by people not used to reading subtitles. It's like a logo of the TV channel, after some time your brain just filters it out and it doesn't steal your attention at all. I grew up reading subtitles and I'm absolutely not aware of the text when watching the movies, my brain just picks it up. If it's in one of the languages that I speak I'll both listen to the original and read the subtitles, and it all happens also on auto-pilot without ever really thinking about it. I become aware of that only when the translation doesn't match.

If the subtitles « don’t steal your attention at all » you’re not reading them. I agree that one might be able to ignore the subtitles in the same way that one can ignore the logo.

Edit: I’m used to subtitles. In the same language, in another language, even in two other languages at the same time. One reads them unconsciously, a few minutes later maybe one can’t even recall if there were subtitles or not. But when you’re reading them, even if it’s just a fraction of the time, you’re not looking at the whole picture. Comparing them to the network logo is ridiculous.

I remember watching City of God with someone and afterwards asking about the subtitles. "What subtitles?" He hadn't noticed he was reading subtitles. Raved about the film, though; aware that they must have been speaking Portuguese, but with genuinely no memory of the non-English language or the subtitles.

It's funny. I have watched so much TV/anime with subtitles that I am now used to having them, even for shows with dialogue already in my mother tongue (Cantonese). Sometimes I watch TV and forget to turn on the subtitles, and I start feeling uncomfortable or even have trouble understanding, even though I can hear the dialogue perfectly well.

Another phenomenon is that, due to the sheer amount of Japanese drama/anime I have watched with English subtitles, I can often spot translations that are unidiomatic, even though I have no formal training in the Japanese language.

As a sibling comment points out, you forget it’s even there. In a Swedish theater American movies have subtitles but when I watch them at home I usually don’t use subtitles. No difference whatsoever in immersion, comprehension or overall pleasure.

The only annoying thing could be bad subtitles, as in the translation is poor and you notice it. And of course jokes that don’t work in Swedish get lost or changed in translation, which you notice in the subtitles. These situations happen maybe once, for five seconds. Far less annoying than not even hearing the actors’ performance.

If you don’t need the subtitles and you don’t read them they are definitely much less distracting.

Regarding the « no difference whatsoever », you noted in a previous comment that you know a few seconds in advance what’s going to be said.

> Regarding the « no difference whatsoever », you noted in a previous comment that you know a few seconds in advance what’s going to be said.

Yes, sometimes that will affect the drama of the scene since the pacing of information in the scene might be compromised. That's likely to happen with dubbing too, because the grammar doesn't match and a name has to be mentioned at the beginning of the sentence in one language instead of the end, as the director intended. Since Swedish and English are both Germanic languages it doesn't happen that often in the few movies that are dubbed to Swedish, but I've seen it get really weird in Swedish films dubbed to Spanish.

Either way, in my experience, if I see Clint Eastwood's line a moment before he says it, I can still feel the scorching sun and smell the gunpowder like I'm there in the old American west. That atmosphere disappears completely when I hear his line in German or French.

It’s amusing that you mention Eastwood. If you are thinking of spaghetti westerns the sound wasn’t really recorded when filming (actors were using multiple languages anyway) and the movie was dubbed on studio by the original actors or someone else depending on the output language.

“There was a crude “guide track” recording what was spoken, but often Leone lost or ignored this guide track and when the time came to loop the dialogue, frequently no one could remember who had said what. Eastwood recalls being warned to keep his OWN NOTES about what he said in each scene, and sure enough, when he was called on to loop the two Dollar movies, production had lost the guide track. They had NO IDEA what Clint had actually said in each scene and Clint had to re-record them as best he could remember. (Another reason why his lip movements don’t entirely match up.)“

Lots of movie productions make actors dub the dialogue after shooting, it still creates a mismatch between the atmosphere and the dialogue when you change the language, which was my argument.

What about films where the original language doesn't match the "atmosphere"? If I understand correctly, you would rather see Gladiator dubbed in Latin than in the original version? Are hobbits expected to speak English?

The right language can heighten the atmosphere, but otherwise a skilled director working closely with the rest of the crew can make it work. Remove the control of the director by using voice actors who were not directed by the director and it will take away from that work.

Reduction of atmosphere is just one of the reasons I don't like dubbing, the fact that it robs the actor of his or her oral performance is the major one. But there are more reasons, many of them I've already mentioned such as mismatch in grammar leading to changes in the dramatic pacing.

Imagine being the director of the movie, and knowing that subtitles are spreading your work to those who otherwise wouldn't ever care to watch it due to the language barrier

Don’t you think they will feel the same about dubbing?

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